He was also a talented architect and in helped found the Florence Academy. An Allegory of the Immaculate Conception c. Vasari was encouraged to compile his Lives of the Artists when he was in Rome in With the help of numerous contributors and his own enormous visual memory, his monumental book follows the belief of his times — that the purpose of art is the imitation and perfection of nature and that progress in art can be measured by how far it achieves this aim.
The Adoration of the Magi — He is careless with dates, some of his anecdotes are hearsay or traditional myths, but, particularly with the artists of his own day, he is still a fundamental source of information on Renaissance art.
His biographical model of art history, with its interest in personality and character as well as achievement, was influential across Europe in the seventeenth century.
There are only artists. New stories, newly added artworks and shop offers delivered straight to your inbox every week. Created with Sketch. About Discover Learn Support us. Main menu Close. Sign in Register. Email address. According to Satkowski, Vasari "set out early and deliberately to make himself an artist of influence," surrounding himself indeed with authors, architects, and artists of renown and developing a shrewd eye for cultivating patrons.
In Vasari's Florentine friend and former schoolmate, the now Cardinal Ippolito de' Medici, asked the artist to join him, Vasari's close friend Francesco Salviati, and the Medici entourage in Rome. Vasari viewed this time in Rome as his golden age, where he and his colleagues spent their days drawing and studying Roman ruins, monuments, buildings, statues and the Vatican's Raphael and Michelangelo frescoes.
A year later, the year-old Vasari joined the Florentine painters' guild and he would become instrumental in elevating the guild's prestige. Scholar Leon Satkowski presents a biographical picture of Vasari as something of a narcissist. He was on the one hand "loyal, hard-working, and totally committed to the political aspirations of his patrons.
Vasari could be at once "confident," "proud," "hypersensitive to criticism," and "desirous of recognition and respectability. Vasari's employ with the Medici family was long-standing, and profitable both for his family - the Medici family sponsored one of his sister's dowries, for instance - as well as for him personally.
In , Alessandro de' Medici paid Vasari four hundred ducats for his work, and also, according to Ingrid Rowland and Noah Charney, "assigned him the revenue from fines levelled at artists who failed to fulfil their commissions, a further three hundred ducats a year": Vasari had become a financial success at the age of only There is a popular argument that Vasari might have been a better architect than painter.
However, according to Satkowski, Vasari "lacked conventional training in architecture and came to it relatively late in his distinguished career. According to Vasari himself, it was only in his twenties c. Vasari's buildings are characterized by their diversity in type, meanings, and style.
He placed particular emphasis on his buildings' symbolism and conceptual ideas, and, in Satkowski's terms, provided "virtuoso solutions to the complexities posed by their urban sites.
In , Vasari published his seminal text, The Lives of the Most Eminent Sculptors, Painters, and Architects , in collaboration with his friend Vincenzo Borghini as well as local experts.
Despite its manifest shortcomings, the text crystalized the ideology of the Renaissance as the aesthetic progression out of the Dark Ages of the Medieval era and into an enlightened return to Classical ideals. It became a cornerstone of art historiography and the periodization of the Renaissance style. The Lives was thus envisioned as an ideological foundation for a Florentine art school. A second edition of The Lives was published in and, in this version, Vasari afforded Venetian artists including Titian their rightful place in the development of the Renaissance.
Vasari had hoped that his original tome would guarantee his application to join Duke Cosimo de' Medici's court, though that honor would be denied him until Given his difficult personality, Vasari was ripe for criticism and public reproach. Descended from generations of potters, Vasari received his early artistic training in Arezzo from the painter and stained-glass maker Guillaume de Marcillat. He also acquired basic humanist learning, including Latin. He subsequently moved to Florence where he worked under the painter Andrea Del Sarto and the sculptor Baccio Bandinelli.
Vasari had a prolific career in the city, working chiefly for the Medici family, notably for Cosimo I, Grand Duke of Tuscany. He cultivated friendships with many artists, including Michelangelo, who influenced his style. Vasari travelled extensively, working in Rome, Naples, and his native Arezzo. According to his own account, he was apprenticed as a boy to Andrea del Sarto in Florence. He apparently suffered at the hands of Andrea's wife, to judge from the waspish references to her in his life of Andrea.
Vasari's career is well documented, the fullest source of information being the autobiography added to the edition of his Lives. Vasari had an extremely active career, but much of his time was spent as an impresario devising decorations for courtly festivals and similar ephemera.
He fulsomely praised the Medici family for forwarding his career from childhood, and much of his work was done for Cosimo I, Grand Duke of Tuscany. Vasari was a prolific painter in the mannerist style and was also active as an architect, his talents in the latter profession being superior to those he displayed as a painter.
He supervised the building of Pope Julius III's Villa Giulia near Rome, but his masterpiece is the reconstruction of the Uffizi picture gallery in Florence from , originally the offices of the grandducal administration. Vasari's Lives was published in Florence in ; it was revised and enlarged in He venerated Michelangelo to the point of idolatry.
0コメント